Category: Culture

In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as players play a game because we want to enact a story even while we as a group compose its microscopic details. So the players’ intention is aligned with the DM’s.

However, I often feel that many stories often go very quickly from the introductory session to the more important parts of the story, forcing characters to cooperate for the story to progress, irrespective of whether the characters have sufficient incentive to do so. In other cases, the story would be solid but the other players will have essayed their characters in such a way that your character begins to resemble a tool to solve a problem rather than persist as a person of feelings.

One way or another, either the character feels clumsy to the player or the player begins to inject their resentment into their character – and ultimate both are opposed to the DM’s intention.

Role-playing is fun because it is – among other things – an exercise in handling this tension well. Successful role-playing is not just wearing the skin of your character but also contributing to the game without also tripping it. Some players are better at it than others.

One way this proficiency could shine through is when you’re good at keeping your in-character responses to in-game stimuli both appropriate and useful at the same time. Other players – such as myself – reveal they might be struggling with it when their spontaneous responses are out of line and they don’t realise it until after a session concludes.

Recently, I was able to identify a few attributes that could be interfering with how I handle this tension, to the extent that my characters often seem difficult to play with. One of them is my cynicism. I’m more cynical in real-life than a person of my age ought to be, a tendency fuelled by the way I think about the world as a journalist. It’s difficult to hope and hope again when cynicism pays off as often as it does. It’s also made for a surprisingly successful way to cope with the near-constant influx of bad news.

Some would argue that we must be skeptical instead of cynical, and nurture the ability to hope even in the face of a shit-stream. I think that’s simply using language to blunt our sharper edges. I have hope, too, for better days but I’m not surprised when they don’t turn up.

Anyway, such cynicism doesn’t directly drip down into my characters – it’s the way I handle situations as a result that does. My characters don’t purport to be cynical people but they inadvertently behave like cynical people do.

Often this manifests in two specific ways: a) unrelenting mistrust in the face of novelty, and b) evaluating each situation from scratch without factoring in the character’s emotional trajectory thus far. They regularly conflict with the DM’s intentions a) by conjuring mini-instances in the game where other players have to expend time to persuade me of what was always going to be the outcome, and b) by rendering my character somewhat, if not entirely, unpredictable (thanks to Chitralekha Manohar for helping flesh this out).

I never doubted that playing DnD would contribute to my overall character development (pun obviously intended), so this is an opportunity to figure out how I can chamfer my cynicism – and some ego with it – in the real and the fantastic at once. The question is how.

On a more superficial level, it requires acknowledging that DnD is a distinctly different form of storytelling than reading a novel is, and more similar to writing one. A character playing the game might not know what will come next – maybe not even what ought to come – as much as the DM will. But this information shortage doesn’t free characters from the responsibility to keep the plot moving.

As a result, there’s no way their responses to different stimuli are going to be 100% optimal all the time. It’s likely to be mostly suboptimal, and that’s okay. It’s like a novel-writing exercise but it’s never going to be identical to it. As Chitralekha said,

Because the dice play such a big role in DnD, meaning is made retrospectively, and events themselves are not logical. If you’re supposed to be super-stealthy but roll a 1, you retrospectively explain it saying, for example, that your shoe laces weren’t tied.

On a deeper level, the process of being a good player and a predictable character (as a proxy for an understandable character) can be catalysed if there exists a fixed set of rules to play ‘right’. Resolving the overall tension itself (as opposed to solving any other player/character problems) holds some clues to this. To recall:

[Mistrust in the face of novelty] regularly conflicts with the DM’s intentions … by conjuring mini-instances in the game where other players have to expend time to persuade me of what was always going to be the outcome.

Chitralekha described this situation as one in which the character who needs to be persuaded hijacks the DM’s control of the game and becomes a DM themselves. I like this way of framing the problem because it doesn’t propose to ‘solve’ the tension by getting rid of it, but acknowledges its existence and hints at a reasonable way out. For instance, as she said, a character can’t assume this mantle without also assuming the DM’s traditional responsibilities: to keep the story moving, to encourage the characters to act in a way that the DM wants them to but without forcing them to do so, and to ensure the players are having a good time.

Everyone must acknowledge that these conditions actively disqualify characters from being asocial, antisocial, attention-seeking or engaging in any socially non-cooperative behaviour in general. These are all flaws – except maybe the first one – that we encounter in other people in many ways on a regular basis. But in a DnD game, they give rise to decisions on the part of characters that are counterproductive to the DM’s wishes.

Let’s abstract this: is there a guiding rationale that unites the DM’s responsibilities? Chitralekha identified one, that DMs always reward good behaviour and punish – at least not-reward – bad behaviour in fair and appropriate ways. Are there any other ways, and if so, what could they be?

An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can’t stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial review fails to mention is the depth of this genre – like all genres – and restricts its attention to one band, The HU, while ignoring its breadth.

You’re probably wondering why I expected better, or that I’m being too harsh. Both would be right: I’m just peeved because I’ve been following Tuvan throat-singing for years and that it’s unfair that the one time a somewhat widely read publication picked up on it (3QD, not Phantom Sway), they chose to limit themselves to such a cursory review.

In fact, the most important thing Phantom Sway does, and does badly, is lumps all of throat-singing into one group called “Mongolian throat singing”. There are actually multiple types depending on the tones to be achieved as well as the regions in which they’re practised. And multiple proponents of multiple sub-genres as a result.

Throat-singing itself is a feature of multiple cultures, from Canada to Tibet to Japan. My favourite throat-singer, Albert Kuvezin, employs a form called kargyraa, a part of the Tuvan throat-singing of southern Siberia. The other forms of this classification are khoomei (recognised by UNESCO) and sygyt. They each have their own sub-styles as well, and many of them bear marked differences over just subtle variations.

Other forms of throat-singing from other regions include the khai of the Altai Republic and the now-extinct rekuhkara of Hokkaido.

The band that Phantom Sway picked, The HU a.k.a. Hunnu Rock, is a self-proclaimed proponent of what it calls ‘New Mongolian Rock’, seemingly shunning the throat-singing based classification.

If you’re into this type of music, you should check out Kuvezin’s discography, the punk-rock band Yat-Kha and the heavy-metal band Tengger Cavalry. My personal favourites are Hartyga – their album ‘Agitator’ exemplifies their brand of “psychedelic ethno-rock” –, the artisanal Huun Huur Tu, and a selection of less well-known singers/groups including Ay-Kherel.

There are two good options if you want to explore more of the zeitgeist of this musical genre: the music of Kongar Ool-Ondar and – even better – the Tuvan short-film Shu-De, produced by Michael Faulkner and released in 2013.

But whatever you do, please don’t start and stop with The HU. They’re new, mainstream, and it isn’t clear if they see themselves as exponents of throat-singing or instead – as some have pointed out – those of a particular politics.

Can’t believe I’m so late to the party. It seems that a year ago, Steven Erikson put the Kharkhanas Trilogy on hold, delaying the publication of the third book. The second book, Fall of Light, came out two years ago and was a difficult read in many ways. More than anything else, it contained way more plots than did the first book, Forge of Darkness, while simultaneously leaving the last book with lots left to explain.

It was like Erikson had lost his way. If he was feeling unsure of himself as a result, I’m glad he’s temporarily shelving the project. It’s not good for readers if books in a series are going to be released with many years in between each instalment but that’s already happened: Forge of Darkness was published in 2012 and Fall of Light, in 2016. Right now, it’s more important for fans like me that Erikson find his mojo and just complete the canon before he dies.

Erikson has also announced (in October 2017) that said mojo quest will take the form of writing the first book in the more-awaited Toblakai (a.k.a. Witness) Trilogy. This is good news because Malazan fans have been more eager to read about the exploits of Karsa Orlong than those of the Tiste races, at least in hindsight and with the hope that the Toblakai story isn’t as frowzy and joyless.

I personally find Karsa to be a dolt and not among my top 50 favourite characters from the series. However, I do find him entertaining and expect the Toblakai Trilogy to be even more so given that the premise is that Karsa is going to rouse the Toblakai in a war against civilisation. Very like the Jaghut story but with less sneering, more cockiness. Hopefully it will prove to be the cure Erikson needs.

Erikson also mentioned that he had been demotivated by the fact that Fall of Light‘s sales were lower than that of Forge of Darkness. Though he initially attributed this to readers waiting for Erikson to finish writing the series so they could read it one go, he found he couldn’t explain the success of Ian Esslemont’s Dancer’s Lament with the same logic: Lament is the first book in the unfinished Path of Ascendancy series. He concluded readers were simply being fatigued by reading Fall of Light. I wouldn’t blame them: it was even more difficult to read than the midsection of Deadhouse Gates.

I’m also starting to dislike his tendency to include overly garrulous characters whose loquaciousness the author seems to want to use to voice his every thought. After a point (which is quickly reached), it just feels like Erikson is bragging. The Malazan series had the intolerable gas-bags Kruppe and Iskaral Pust. Fall of Light was only made worse by Prazek and Dathenar and their completely unnecessary chapter-long soliloquies; at least Kruppe and Pust did things.

This is another thing I’m wary of in the Toblakai Trilogy, although I doubt my prayers will be answered, because you could see Erikson had fun with Karsa in the Malazan series. In fact, more broadly speaking, I’m wary of any new Erikson epic fantasy book because though I know the world and the stories are going to be fantastic, his writing is tiring and his storytelling is more flawed than it otherwise tends to be when he feels compelled to expose, or soliloquise, rather than narrate.

Actually, forget wary – I’ve almost given up on it. Shortly before the release of Forge of Darkness, Erikson had written for Tor that he’s going to keep the trilogy more traditional and make it less of a critique of the epic fantasy subgenre than he did with the Malazan series. Look what it turned out to be. And I only say I’ve almost given up because I hope Erikson attributes Fall of Light‘s tragedy to a different mistake, but then why should he? I found the fencing metaphor from his Tor piece to be instructive in this regard:

As a long-time fencer I occasionally fight a bout against a beginner. They are all enthusiasm, and often wield their foil like a whip, or a broadsword. Very hard to spar with. Enthusiasm without subtlety is often a painful encounter for yours truly, and I have constant ache in hands from fractured fingers and the like, all injured by a wailing foil or epee. A few of those injuries go back to my own beginning days, when I did plenty of my own flailing about. Believe it or not, that wild style can be effective against an old veteran like me. It’s hard to stay subtle with your weapon’s point when facing an armed Dervish seeking to chop down a tree. The Malazan series wailed and whirled on occasion. But those three million words are behind me now. And hopefully, when looking at my fans, they are more than willing to engage in a more subtle duel, a game of finer points. If not, well, I’m screwed.

On the other hand, I’ve really enjoyed Esslemont’s writing, which thankfully has only improved since Night of Knives. I hope Dancer’s Lament continues this trend. I purchased it this morning and hope I can complete it and the next book, as well as a reread of some of Esslemont’s other books, by the time Erikson’s The God is Not Willing is published.